" Is one to conclude that Clinton is a radical? Was
the Kennedy book a put-up job to place them over the top with
their right-wing sponsors? Or do they really find Kitty Kelley
credible? Could they really not have known that Priscilla Johnson
McMillan was doing the same thing with Kennedy that she had
recently done with Oswald in her book Marina and Lee? To put it
another way: if your function is to discredit a decade, what
better way to do it than to smear the man most responsible for
ushering it in?
A Question of Character,
But Not Kennedy's
Which brings us to Thomas Reeves. By the nineties, the negative
literature on the Kennedys had multiplied so much that it was
possible just to put it all together and make a compendium of it.
In 1991, Reeves did just that with his book A Question of
Character. It obediently follows the path paved by its noted
predecessors. In fact, many of his footnotes are to Davis and to
Collier and Horowitz. Although Reeves is another Ph. D., he never
questions the faulty methodology I have pointed out. On the
contrary, by ignoring the primary sources, he can actually state
that JFK authorized the Castro plots, and that John Davis is
especially authoritative on the issue (p. 463). Predictably, he
completely buys into Exner's book and, like Liz Smith, tries to
portray her as a victim of the Kennedy protecting "liberal media"
(p. 424). He even endorses the Kitty Kelley 1988 People update of
Exner's story, finding